I started using the sound alerts on a machine with VS2008 express – and I just learnt that this tweak works for VS2003 and VS2008 but not VS2005. Here’s how it (apparently) came about:

First, MS deliberately took it out. Quoting Paul Harrington: “The audio cues were removed for performance reasons. Initializing the multimedia DLLs to play the sounds was costing several hundred milliseconds in some high priority performance scenarios.”

That was a weird move – made even weirder by not removing the control panel options for setting build event sounds.

Indeed, MS got a lot of heat from devs and changed their mind – both on that same forum thread (quoting Harrington again: “We made the wrong engineering decision to remove the feature..”), and on MS connect. The feature happily returned on VS2008.